Abstract

This article presents a critical analysis of mentoring for social inclusion. It traces its dramatic international expansion as a tool of education policies in the 1990s, and identifies a new model, 'engagement mentoring', which seeks to re-engage 'disaffected' young people with the formal labour market, and to engage their commitment to dominant interests through shaping their dispositions in line with 'employability'. Mentors are treated as vehicles for these objectives, their dispositions also subject to transformation according to gendered stereotypes of care. The model is illustrated by a case study of engagement mentoring, and feminist readings of Bourdieu and Marx are used to relocate it within the socio-economic context from which it is usually disembedded. The article concludes that engagement mentoring constructs the habitus of both mentor and mentee as a raw material subjected to an emotional labour process.